Wednesday, March 25, 2015

This is the outline for what will eventually be an online course in US history, which will be written by some combination of me and an actual historian, and musically annotated by me. I'm going to need technical help, too, in terms of interactive graphics on the web so people can interface with the course in different ways -- chronologically, geographically, etc. Feedback welcome!

Black Flag Flying

Lesson: the intersection of war,
transatlantic trade, horrendous working conditions, and piracy

Berkshire Hills

Lesson: the bourgeois nature of the
American Revolution, and the peasant rebellion against the same
landlords that immediately followed the revolution, which gave rise
to the Bill of Rights.

The Man Who Burned the White House Down

Lesson: the War of 1812 – a
British effort to retake the colonies, or an unprovoked US invasion
and attempted annexation of Canada that failed miserably?

Trade War

Lesson: the First Opium War – an
early US effort at projecting military might far beyond its borders,
in cooperation with former colonial master, Great Britain, France and
Russia.

Landlord

Lesson: the Rent Strike Wars in
upstate New York, coupled with the fear of 1848 coming to the New
World, ended with a breakup of the great estates of the landed gentry
in New York, and ultimately to the revolutionary (for white people)
Homestead Act of 1862.

St Patrick Battalion

Lesson: in the 1840's there was
massive emigration from Europe to the US, so there was a labor
surplus. What did the US leadership do with a labor surplus? Start
a war, of course.

Egyptian Rag

Lesson: the case of the importation
of disinterred Egyptian mummy wrappings for the use of making paper
in the paper mills of Maine throughout the last half of the 19th
century is an especially macabre illustration of the problematic,
amoral tendencies of the market.

John Brown

Lesson: the abolitionist movement
took many forms, involving pacifists, militants, and those who were
pacifists in public but sending guns to people like John Brown in
private. John Brown and his supporters are best known for the failed
uprising they tried to foment in the town of Harper's Ferry, in what
is now West Virginia. What they should perhaps be better remembered
for is their successful efforts to drive the forces of slavery out of
the freshly-stolen US state of Kansas.

Joe Hill

Lesson: The early 20th
century saw the rise of the biggest, most militant and by far the
most artistic labor union in US history, the Industrial Workers of
the World. At many levels of government, the powers-that-be feared
the rise of the IWW to such a degree that they formed a national
police force, the FBI, in order to systematically crush this
organization.

Neither King Nor Kaiser

Lesson: there had been widespread
popular opposition to previous imperial adventures, and the most
massive global military mobilization to date, the First World War,
saw an equally massive antiwar movement arise throughout the US and
the world. In Washington, DC the Congress passed the Espionage Act
in order to suppress the antiwar movement and imprison its
leadership.

Battle of Blair Mountain

Lesson: Despite the suppression of
the IWW, the US labor movement continued to fight mostly unsuccessful
battles throughout the 1920's. The most dramatic of these struggles
was probably the Coal Mine Wars of 1920-21 in West Virginia, which
culminated in the three-day pitched battle when 10,000 union miners
laid siege to the town of Mingo.

Union Makes Us Strong

Lesson: the labor movement of the
1930's was much more successful. With the powers-that-be fearing an
armed uprising at the beginning of the Great Depression, for the
first time there was significant support for the labor movement on
the part of the federal government, which saw the CIO-led movement as
a less violent alternative to revolution.

The Last Lincoln Veteran

Lesson: many people would say that
the first battle in the course of World War II happened well before
1939 (and certainly before 1941, when the US officially entered the
war), when in 1936 the fascist-led armies of Germany and Italy
invaded Spain, in order to support the mutinous Spanish military in
its struggle against Spanish democracy. Progressive people from
across the US and the world volunteered to fight alongside the
Spanish democrats, while the US supplied essential oil to keep the
fascists' tanks running. When the US survivors of the Spanish Civil
War returned home, they were given the official designation of
Premature Antifascists.

Sugihara

Lesson: boatloads of Jews escaping
Nazi persecution in Europe were turned away from the US. Sweden
didn't publicly offer asylum to all Jews until late in the war, in
1943. While half of Europe's Jews were killed, the other half found
various means of survival and escape, generally involving the active
and death-defying assistance of non-Jews. Two of those people who
risked their lives and livelihood to save the lives of thousands of
European Jews was the Japanese diplomat to Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara
and his wife, Yukiko. (Some of the Sugihara Survivors eventually
settled in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the US.)

Henry Ford Was A Fascist

Lesson: Henry Ford was an active
supporter of fascism and a virulent anti-Semite. His company, the
Ford Motor Company, actively supported the war effort on all sides of
the war, arranging their finances in such a way to ensure that the
company would make massive profits regardless of the outcome of the
conflict.

Korea

Lesson: the Korean War may be known
by some in the US as “the forgotten war,” but it can never be
forgotten for millions of Koreans. More bombs were dropped on Korea
by the US Air Force than all sides of World War II combined. Dams
were bombed, valleys flooded, millions of civilians killed in a
genocidal campaign against the Korean people. Half a million Chinese
soldiers were killed, along with 38,000 US troops, before the
ceasefire that divided the Korean peninsula into two countries, North
and South.

Vasili

Lesson: the Cold War became a hot
war on many occasions, such as when the US Navy attacked Russian
submarines in international waters near Cuba. US authorities knew
that they were provoking Russian nuclear retaliation. Kennedy was
prepared to see a hundred million Americans die as a result of his
brinksmanship. The only reason World War III failed to occur was
because of the actions of one Russian submarine commander named
Vasili Arkhipov.

Song for Hugh Thompson

Lesson: the next genocidal war the
US would start in Asia would be in Vietnam and ultimately also Laos
and Cambodia. As in Korea, more bombs would be dropped by the US Air
Force in these three countries than in all sides of World War II
combined. As in Korea, millions of civilians would be killed by the
end of the war. Unlike Korea, the war in Vietnam did not result in a
division of the country into two halves, but in a complete defeat for
the invading forces. Though to call the Vietnamese victorious would
be a stretch, since their country was a charred, poisoned ruins that
had suffered carpet-bombing, mass defoliation, and an unknown number
of widespread massacres, such as the one at My Lai which helicopter
pilot Hugh Thompson encountered.

Dead

Lesson: rhetoric from President
Nixon, Governor Reagan and others had been heating up for some time
about how terrible the widespread antiwar movement was. The rhetoric
was far from empty, when the National Guard was called in in Ohio,
Mississippi and elsewhere, leading to two unprovoked massacres of
protesters. In Ohio they were shot at a distance of 300 feet, so the
idea that they were defending themselves from stone-throwing students
is patently absurd.

Assata

Lesson: after 100 years of Jim Crow
rule after the pullout of the southern US by the Union Army following
the Civil War, the civil rights movement and then the black power
movement rose up against racism and discrimination across the
country. The response by the state was devastating, with militant
activists such as the Black Panther Party being dealt with with
particular brutality. When Assata Shakur was shot while she had her
hands raised above her head by the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973, the
police had “shoot on sight” orders for all members of the Black
Liberation Army.

When Johnny Came Marching Home

Lesson: the phenomenon of the
homeless veteran was not a new one, but with the ongoing decline of
the US economy coinciding with the end of the Vietnam War and
coinciding with an ever-weakening social safety net, the image of the
homeless veteran became ever more commonplace.

East Tennessee

Lesson: sabotage has always been a
tactic used by disgruntled workers, and it has long been a tactic
employed by members of communities upset by corporations coming in
and destroying their land, water, and way of life. Industrial
sabotage at two mines in Tennessee and Kentucky in 1968 caused over a
million dollars worth of damage to mining equipment. In the decades
since then, groups like the Earth Liberation Front have caused tens
of millions of dollars in damage to industrial equipment, high-end
real estate developments, ever-expanding ski resorts, and more.

Wal-Mart

Lesson: the de-industrialization of
the US that began in earnest in the 1970's also saw the destruction
of downtown areas of cities throughout the country because of the
influence of big developers on urban planners which led to the rapid
spread of suburban shopping malls and big box stores, most notably
the biggest of them all, Wal-Mart.

Used To Be A City

Lesson: the death of Main Street in
the US had profound sociological implications. No longer were most
things in walking distance. The US became a suburban, car-dominated,
increasingly atomized society.

Song for Big Mountain

Lesson: particularly since the
discovery of coal, oil and uranium on mostly barren land that had
been set aside by the US government as Indian Reservation land,
reservation land has been officially designated a National Sacrifice
Zone. Much of it has been exhaustively mined for resources,
poisoning the land and water, causing cancer rates in some areas many
times the national average. From the 1970's to the present, the
mostly elderly population that remains at Big Mountain, in the Black
Mesa area of the Navajo Nation, has been a symbol of native
resistance to the rule of the energy companies and their politicians.

I'm Taking Someone With Me When I Go

Lesson: the alienating
suburbanization of the US, coupled with decaying social systems and
the easy availability of all sorts of firearms led to a big increase
in the number of massacres being committed across the US,
particularly from the 1980's to the present.

Drink of the Death Squads

Lesson: the huge phenomenon of the
outsourcing of US industry has generally involved US corporations
opening operations in countries where labor and environmental laws or
enforcement of those laws are very lax. In many cases in means
moving to countries where union organizing is prevented through the
use of Death Squads, such as in Colombia. The process of
corporations going where the wages and environmental and other
regulations are the worst is known as the Race to the Bottom.

Ballad of Eola Park

Lesson: in response to rising
post-industrial poverty, homelessness and hunger in the US, and in
protest against the massive US military budget that is one way to
explain all that poverty, one of the networks that arose nationwide,
beginning in the San Francisco Bay Area, is Food Not Bombs. Very
much an ongoing thing, FNB activists are frequently arrested for the
crime of feeding people in public spaces. Generally, city fathers
would rather make sure the soup kitchens are out of sight and out of
mind, in church basements, rather than in public parks.

A Brief History of the Orange Line

Lesson: although many highways were
built throughout the US from the 1950's onward, there were many
highways that were not built, as a result of the efforts of the
Anti-Highway Movement. Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts was the location
of one such struggle. The land for the highway had already all been
bought, and construction was underway, but the popular struggle put a
stop to the construction and ultimately forced the authorities to put
in an extension of the subway line instead, with a long, thin park on
top of it, thus making JP the homey neighborhood it is today.

More Gardens Song

Lesson: in the face of increasing
government neglect of increasingly blighted urban neighborhoods from
New York to Los Angeles, one popular response, beginning around the
time of the Tompkins Square Park movement in New York City in the
1980's, has been guerrilla gardening.

Sometimes I Walk the Aisles

Lesson: ever-weakening government
oversight of workplaces in the US and the rise of anti-union “Right
to Work” legislation in many states has had a depressing effect on
wages and worker safety. Examples of the consequences of “Right to
Work” legislation include events such as the fire at the chicken
nugget factory in Hamlet, North Carolina in 1991 that led to the
deaths of 25 workers, mostly African-American women.

Cordova

Lesson: in the wake of the Exxon
Valdez oil spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound, the fisheries were
poisoned and largely destroyed. The salmon's lives begin in
freshwater, and their numbers began to recover not long after the
spill. The herring, however, have never recovered to this day. When
it became clear that the herring were not going to be coming back,
every seaworthy vessel in the fishing town of Cordova, Alaska
participated in a three-day/three-night blockade of Prince William
Sound, forcing oil tankers to circle on either side of the blockade,
waiting to be able to go one way or the other. They ended their
blockade when the US government agreed to finance the first major
scientific study on the toxicity of oil, which, centuries into the
age of fossil fuels, had never to that point been done.

Song for the SOA

Lesson: the imperial foreign
policies of the US have long involved training the soldiers of client
states in how to maintain the rule of the elite in their corner of
the world. One institution where such training has taken place for
many decades is the School of the Americas in Columbus, Georgia, on
the Fort Benning military base. When graduates of the SOA executed
six Jesuit priests and their maid in El Salvador, Jesuits and others
from across the US began organizing frequent protests insisting on
the closure of this school for the Death Squads.

Song for Basra

Lesson: according to the UN, the
punishing sanctions on Iraq throughout the 1990's – under both
Republican and Democratic administrations in the US – led to the
deaths of half a million children. Throughout this period, during
which there was officially no war going on between the US and Iraq,
the US bombed Iraq regularly.

The Dying Firefighter

Lesson: the ongoing US occupation
of Iraq coupled with US support for the ongoing Israeli occupation of
Palestine gave rise to an increase in anti-American sentiment
throughout the Muslim world. One of the offshoots of this increasing
resentment was the growth of groups like Al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
On September 11th, 2001, Al-Qaeda operatives attacked the
US and killed several thousand people, along with themselves.

Who Would Jesus Bomb?

Lesson: while secularism is
increasingly the norm in most of the western world, increasing
poverty in the US has seen a growing Christian fundamentalist
movement. Both George Bush and Tony Blair considered themselves
religious Christians waging what Bush referred to as a “crusade”
against terrorism.

Barbara Lee

Lesson: before the fires had gone
out at the World Trade Center, the Congress voted overwhelmingly to
give President Bush nearly unlimited war-making powers. The sole
voice of dissent in the Congress was California's Barbara Lee.

Miami

Lesson: the end of the 20th
century saw the rise throughout the US of an anti-capitalist movement
that was challenging the “free trade” deals such as NAFTA and the
WTO. Hitting the notice of the world stage with the WTO protests in
Seattle in 1999, the protests in Miami outside of the FTAA meetings
in 2003 were widely seen as the nail in the coffin of this
short-lived anti-capitalist movement, which suffered from wanton
police brutality as well as internal divisions exacerbated by the
terrorist attacks on 9/11.

Operation Iraqi Liberation

Lesson: although most of the
hijackers were Saudi, and although the Taleban government of
Afghanistan offered to turn Osama Bin Laden over to another Muslim
country, the US insisted on invading and taking over Afghanistan in
retaliation for 9/11, and then proceeded to reason that it was
necessary to invade and occupy Iraq because of some undefined or
inaccurate threat that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government
presented. The result of the invasion, officially named Operation
Iraqi Freedom, but inadvertently and abortively dubbed Operation
Iraqi Liberation (OIL), was that a little more than a decade later, a
terrorist group even scarier than Al-Qaeda controls much of both Iraq
as well as Syria.

After We Torture Our Prisoners

Lesson: very soon after the US/UK
invasion of Iraq, the news broke that US prisoners were being
systematically tortured in prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and
elsewhere. This, among other things, made the efforts at winning the
hearts and minds of the occupied peoples of the Muslim world that
much harder, since it became increasingly difficult for the US to
present itself as a real alternative to regimes that they were
replacing, which also engaged in wanton torture.

Paul Wolfowitz

Lesson: in 2005 Paul Wolfowitz was
appointed head of the World Bank. Previous to his appointment to
this position, he had been one of the chief architects of the
invasion and occupation of Iraq, which involved the wholesale
privatization of the Iraqi economy. Some people think Paul
Wolfowitz's career trajectory is a poetic illustration of the way
economic and military power is coordinated by the US empire.

Song for Cindy Sheehan

Lesson: in August of 2005 Cindy
Sheehan led a people's occupation of the outskirts of President
Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. This encampment marked the end of
what had been a very active, nationwide antiwar movement that began,
in that incarnation, in September, 2001.

New Orleans

Lesson: the
growing frailty of US infrastructure combined with the increased
power of hurricanes as a result of climate change resulted in a
devastating storm that destroyed much of the city of New Orleans in
2005. People from all over the country went to New Orleans to try to
help, but federal government efforts to assist were characterized
mainly by racism and incompetence. The city has since been
ethnically cleansed.

Holy Land Five

Lesson: the ongoing “war on
terror” begun officially in September 2001 has led to many
prosecutions of people on the grounds of terrorism. Almost all of
them have been cases of entrapment by FBI agents who created the
plots in the first place, and then sought accomplices. In the case
of the Holy Land Foundation, the founders of the charity were
sentenced to between 15-65 years for the crime of distributing food
and medicine to needy people in places like the occupied West Bank
and Gaza, but doing so through the wrong channels.

Song for Oscar Grant

Lesson: in recent years the
phenomenon of police killing young black men has captured the
attention of the news media and much of society. One of the earlier
police killings that got a lot of attention because the victim was
lying on the ground with handcuffs on when he was shot, and because
many people filmed the incident on their cell phones, was that of
Oscar Grant in Oakland, California on the first day of January, 2009.

In the Name of God

Lesson: the legalization of
abortion in the US in 1973 saw the rise of a violent anti-abortion
“pro-Life” movement that regularly bombed women's clinics and
killed medical staff, including, in 2009, Dr George Tiller of Kansas.

I Know A Man

Lesson: in recent years in many different US states and in
countries around the world, decades of struggle by LGBTQ for marriage
equality has started to bear fruit.

If Only It Were True

Lesson: in 2008
Barack Obama was elected president, and he was reelected in 2012.
Republicans have generally tried to paint him as a liberal, pacifist,
environmentalist advocate for the welfare state. His record would
tend to indicate otherwise.

Song for Chelsea Manning

Lesson: the
Obama administration has prosecuted and imprisoned more
whistle-blowers than any other administration in US history. Many
think Chelsea Manning should be given awards for exposing terrible
war crimes committed by US forces, but instead she is serving a
35-year prison sentence.

Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler

Lesson: after
one of the worst environmental disasters in world history took place
in the Gulf Coast in 2010, the temporary ban on more deep water oil
drilling was lifted, making the possibility of another similar
disaster ever more likely.

Occupy Wall Street

Lesson: inspired
by the Arab Spring and angered by the bank bailout, the subprime
mortgage crisis, etc., many thousands of people across the US took to
the streets and formed public encampments in the center of hundreds
of cities in the US, Canada and elsewhere in the world. The Occupy
encampments often lasted at least two months, despite the fact that
most of them regularly had to deal with police brutality, altogether
many thousands of arrests, disruptive infiltrators, and in many
cases, rain and freezing temperatures.

Meanwhile In Afghanistan

Lesson: during
the NATO summit in Chicago in the spring of 2012, several young men
were arrested and charged with terrorism. It was a typical case of
entrapment. What was atypical was that this time those charged were
white Occupy activists who had come up from Florida to join the
protests, and made the mistake of staying in the home of someone with
beer-brewing equipment, which the undercover cops also staying there
claimed was going to be used for making molotov cocktails.

Osama Bin Laden Is Dead

Lesson: the
Obama administration's continuation of the “war on terror”
featured a helicopter raid on the home of Osama Bin Laden. Notably,
during the raid Bin Laden's body was dumped at sea. What message
does this send?

Prism

Lesson: probably
the world's most well-known whistle-blower is Edward Snowden, who
confirmed what many people suspected to be the case, that the NSA is
spying on everyone, everywhere, indiscriminately.

I Can't Breathe

Lesson: recent
years have seen a depressing series of police killings of young black
men on the streets of the US, and killer cops being acquitted of any
crime afterward, such as with the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City.

Oil Train

Lesson: although
the data has never been clearer that global carbon emissions must be
dramatically decreased in order to avoid global climate catastrophe,
the US has instead engaged in an unregulated, oil- and shale-drilling
free-for-all. This has also involved a huge increase in rail traffic
and accidents on old, badly-maintained railroad tracks that pass
right through populated urban areas. In one town in Quebec, this
resulted in the deaths of 47 people one night. So far in the US
derailments resulting in explosions have been frequent, but have only
occurred in less populated areas.

Pipeline

Lesson: rather
than dealing with the climate crisis or even repairing aging rail
infrastructure, the US and Canada have been engaging in frenzied
pipeline-building, in order to ship the dirtiest fossil fuel in the
world to ports where it can be sold overseas.

Mudslide

Lesson:
badly-regulated or unregulated logging practices have been
characteristic of how resource extraction is done in the “free
market” USA. The result of the lack of oversight has been a lot of
unnecessary erosion and soil depletion, polluted land and water, and
landslides. Occasionally these landslides happen in populated areas,
such as when half of the town of Oso, Washington, was wiped out one
day.

A Dream Foreclosed

Lesson: the
Global Financial Crisis of 2008 resulted in banks being bailed out on
an unprecedented scale, and millions of people in the US losing their
homes. Unlike the banks, the people were not bailed out to any
significant extent. Many former homeowners are now living in
unstable circumstances, including in many cases, in cars and tents.

Gentrification Town

Lesson: while
many cities across the US lie abandoned and ignored, other cities
such as Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon, are
experiencing rapid gentrification. Between the 2000 and the 2010
censuses, the historically African-American neighborhoods of Portland
have lost much of their black populations. Monthly rent in many
neighborhoods has doubled in the past decade. Under state law, rent
control in Oregon is illegal.

Song for Pelican Bay

Lesson: the US
has long been the leader in the world in terms of imprisoning the
highest proportion of its population compared to any other country.
In terms of imprisoning its black population, it beat apartheid South
Africa in terms of the number of people of African origin locked up.
There's a long history of resistance to US prison policies, which
involve systematic daily torture of tens of thousands of US citizens
through solitary confinement, beatings, and other cruel practices.
In the summer of 2013, tens of thousands of prisoners across
California went on a hunger strike.

Statue in the Harbor

Lesson: for most
of the history of the US, the only people who could officially
immigrate to the country were Europeans. People of color could only
fall into the category of “guest worker,” and were frequently
banned from entering or deported under the guise of laws like the
Chinese Exclusion Act and others. Policies have since gotten a bit
less racist, but not by much, as events of 2014 demonstrated, with
the widespread deportation of children, without giving them their
rights under international law to seek the asylum that many of them
so clearly needed.

TPP 101

Lesson: the US
has a long history of pushing for international “free trade”
agreements with other countries. These agreements consistently work
in favor of large transnational corporations, and are detrimental to
the US working class and workers around the world. The TPP and TTIP
are the latest in US-sponsored “free trade” deals, since the US
Democratic and Republican leadership agree that previous trade deals
such as the WTO are too democratic to work sufficiently well in favor
of the rich.

15

Lesson: unable
under restrictive anti-union laws in the US to effectively organize
through traditional means, labor unions in recent years have started
an organizing drive through nontraditional means, to raise the wages
of low-income workers up to $15 an hour, what is broadly considered
to be a minimal living wage –
a wage that allows one full-time job to support a small family.

Everything Can Change

Lesson: US
history is full of social movements that have accomplished much, and
forces allied with what the Occupy movement refers to as the 1%
trying to stop the progress of these movements. History also shows
that movements gain momentum and achieve some degree of
sustainability when there is a widespread sense of optimism among the
movement's participants, and society more broadly, that success is
possible.

Monday, March 9, 2015

By the end of March I will have a new thing to hock out on the road. It's a "boxed set" on a 4 GB USB stick. It contains:

21 albums in MP3 form that used to exist as physical CDs (or still do, in some cases)

9 studio albums that have never existed in any physical format as albums, or at all, in the cases of most of the songs on them

2 high-quality recordings of live shows that have never existed in any physical format

a folder full of PDF files with sheet music and lyrics to most of my songs, including my children's songs, a copy of my ebook of travel writing, and the kitchen sink!

I'll be loading the thumb drives with material myself, so they'll always be up to date with my latest recordings. The only place to buy them is directly through me. I'm selling them for $50 each, or $25 for subscribers (those participating in my Community-Support Art scheme). Cost of postage to anywhere in the world that has mail delivery is included in the price!

You can buy them by clicking the button below, or by sending me a check in the mail. If you're buying the thumb drive as a subscriber, please click the drop-down menu above the button to get the subscriber price.

Regular/Subscriber Prices

Checks or money orders (or well-concealed cash in any currency) may be sent to me at:

I'm a topical musician by trade. To
rephrase that, I'm an expert on how to tell stories about the world
around us in a way that is effective and particular to the form of
communication that is music. By effective, I mean telling stories in
a way that reaches people emotionally in a way that most other forms
of communication don't do as well. On March 4th's edition of one of
my favorite radio shows, Democracy Now,
Amy Goodman said, in reference to John Legend's musical contribution
to the film, Selma,
that “culture is so important in getting out information.” I
completely agree, and I agree that Legend's song, “Glory,”
achieves this end brilliantly.

I love
Democracy Now, Amy
Goodman, and John Legend – and I speak now in all sincerity, in
case you're wondering if you should be reading in an edge of sarcasm
here, there is none. Nonetheless, I've had a conflicted relationship
with the music breaks on this wonderful, extremely popular radio
show. There are two of them on each show. They do them for station
identification, but of course so many of the show's listeners are
online, and not hearing any local radio programmers cut in and
identify their stations. Together, we're talking about two 30-second
clips of music in each show, sometimes longer if they're having
trouble reaching someone they're about to interview, or some other
glitch of the sort that happens often in live broadcasts.

So, you may be
thinking to yourself, this guy is getting himself all worked up about
a couple of 30-second music breaks on a news and information show?
Well, yes. And if you keep reading, I think you'll understand why.

I
thought I'd start by laying out the facts that I've gathered. I'm
not a statistician, but I went to a good high school and understand
the rudiments of the scientific method, which I did my best to apply
to my experiment. DN's
music breaks had been grating on me for years, and, after first
trying occasionally over the course of years to plead with Amy and
several of her producers personally to pay more attention to how
they're doing their music breaks, In December, 2013, I started up a
blog, A Musical
Review of Democracy Now, in which I have been keeping track of
musical selections (and, in some of the posts, making observations
about them). I listen to the show religiously anyway, like many
people reading this right now. So jotting down what was in the music
breaks wasn't hard, once I got into the habit of doing that.

There were certain
pieces of information I wanted to gather together. After listening
to a total of 105 shows over the course of 15 months on a completely
random basis – approximately 1/3 of the shows they've done in that
time period – a total of 210 music breaks, the breakdown of the
musical selections I've heard works out as follows.

First
of all, about one-third of DN's
music breaks fall into the category of “unnamed instrumental,”
usually classical Arabic oud music, electronic music, or classic jazz
tunes. The unnamed instrumentals are not part of the statistics that
follow. For the sake of simplicity I'm focused on the most relevant
sample of the music, to my thinking, which is songs with lyrics in
English, the common language of listeners to this show. Songs in
English represent approximately half of the music breaks.
(Incidentally, I am not criticizing here whether music breaks are
instrumental or with lyrics, or whether they're in English or not,
I'm just explaining my methodology here.)

So, of the 106
songs in English played, out of the 210 music breaks I kept track of,
88 of them were written by famous people. 18 of them were written by
independent artists. I'm not good at math, but I believe that breaks
down to 17% of the songs played are songs of indy artists, leaving
83% to be from famous artists.

Of the
128 music breaks with songwriters or composers who were identified
(basically not counting unnamed oud music and some other instrumental
stuff), at least 69 of them, or 53%, were from the 20th
century, most of those from the 1960's or 1970's. At least 40 of the
authors, or 31% of the total, are dead.

Why
are these statistics relevant? Amy Goodman said “culture is so
important in getting out information.” So one question is, what
information are we mainly talking about here? Stuff that happened 60
years ago is certainly information, but is that mainly what a current
events show like DN is
focusing on? And what kind of information is communicated about the
relevance of culture, when the overwhelming majority of music is
derived from famous people from the early part of the latter half of
the 20th
century? John Legend of course is not part of that statistic, though
he very much is part of the “famous” part of the equation.

Of
course, maybe you had never heard of John Legend until you heard his
song on DN – the
left is a pretty insular bunch, so I'm sure for some of you that's
the case. (Insert smiley emoticon here.) But many millions of
people have already heard of John Legend. He's on commercial radio
and TV a lot. I'm not saying that's bad in itself, but it's a fact.
And 83% of other songs played on DN fall into that kind of category.

There are degrees
of “famous,” of course. Bruce Springsteen is one one end of the
spectrum. Pete Seeger isn't as famous as Bruce Springsteen, but he's
still famous. So what is my definition of famous here? I just kept
it simple. If my investigation turns up that the author had at least
one top 40 hit in the charts in the US and/or the UK, and/or that
they won one or more Grammy awards, and/or were inducted into the
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, they're famous.

I
guess I've made the basic statistical point. From here I could wax
philosophical, for better or for worse, but I've done plenty of that
already in previous essays you can read if you want to (such as the
Cultural 1%). What I hadn't done was collected and collated the
actual facts to back up what I'm saying, which I have now done.

Basically, I guess
it's all very subjective. But I'm completely convinced that a
30-second music break between segments on a news show can change
people's lives. The show is too popular to ignore it when they
consistently miss the opportunity to use those breaks to really
support their stories with powerful, contemporary, independent music,
of which there is so much to choose from.

But you have to
look for the independent stuff. You have to know how important it is to do that.
Otherwise you default to what you know, and if you grew up in the US,
what you knew is what is or has been popular. The other stuff is
harder to find, so it needs to be an actual priority to find it,
otherwise it doesn't happen. The elitism inherent in 83% of music
played being derived from the cultural 1% probably happens by
accident. It's just the default to do that. But it's still
damaging. It still communicates the wrong message. It says that
contemporary independent music and culture is irrelevant, quite
simply. What you don't play communicates as much as what you do
play.

It's
not that Bob Dylan or Bob Marley should be ignored – they
shouldn't. But if you're doing stories about contemporary issues,
struggles, etc., inevitably, the music that will be powerfully on
topic is going to be equally contemporary. And independent. Can you
imagine if DN only
interviewed best-selling authors? There would be an uproar. Their
listeners would abandon them and call them bad names. Because
everybody knows that the people we want to listen to and interview
and read, etc., are primarily not authors, thinkers and activists who
manage to get on the bestseller lists, or who have first been
featured on CNN before you get around to having them on your show.
Everybody knows that CNN's judgment of who is important is not ours.

So
then why should a music break have to be a song that's been in the
charts, in order for it to be played on DN?
It's not that bestselling authors or hit-producing artists have
nothing important to say – some of them do. But the much larger
number of artists out there who have never been in the charts are the
ones producing the much larger number of great songs. Even if you're
not a professional indy musician like I am, even if you haven't
observed what I'm talking about firsthand, you know what I'm saying
must be likely to be true, statistically. Of the millions of
songwriters in the world, it stands to reason, statistically, that
most of the good ones can't possibly be the very few that come
pre-approved by Clearchannel or even by the BBC or the Motown Records
label, and yet that's exactly 83% of what DN
plays in their music breaks that involve songs, according to my
study.

On a
personal note, it feels relevant to add that criticizing any aspect
of Democracy Now is a
really terrible way to make friends. Understandably enough for
various reasons that I won't bother going into, people worship that
show, and its wonderful host, who I am privileged to have met on many
occasions. I used to be one of the few indy musicians played fairly
regularly on the show, usually several times a year. A significant
amount of my audience in the US is derived from having been played on
DN, particularly
around 2001. The last time I was played on the show was the same
week I started the blog analyzing their music breaks. The response
from many of the people who wrote me after I first started writing
analyses of DN's music
breaks was basically, “wow, you've got a lot of sour grapes, why
don't you quit whining and start your own radio show,” or something
along those lines.

Nonetheless,
what I'm saying is relevant and important, so I'm saying it. Whether
or not it influences DN or
anyone else is not up to me. What's up to me is speaking my mind.
And what I'm talking about is much bigger than this one radio show,
of course. It's about our culture much more broadly than that. The
same patterns DN
engages in can be found in independent radio shows at community
stations throughout the country and the world. In our collective
subconscious, whether we ever listen to commercial radio or not,
Clearchannel calls the shots in our minds, and will continue to do so
as long as leaders of independent media such as Democracy
Now rely primarily on popular
artists from the 20th
century for most of their music breaks.

One of the first
times I met Amy Goodman, I asked her for a quote, as aspiring artists
do when they meet famous or influential people. She floored me, in a
very positive sense, by saying, off the cuff, “how about 'he's the
musical version of Democracy Now?'” I've been proudly identifying
myself with this quote ever since (changing the “he” to “David
Rovics,” since that's who she was referring to there in the
Firehouse studio in lower Manhattan 15 years ago).

If you
change the “the” to “a,” the quote is true. I, and many
other musicians who write songs about the news of the day – topical
music, a longstanding tradition in many genres of music – are
indeed musical versions of Democracy Now.
And oddly enough, the host of the show herself made this
observation. But in actual practice, the musical versions of
Democracy Now are
almost completely ignored by Democracy Now,
and the impact that this oversight has on how DN's
listeners experience and understand the relevance of culture and its
ability to communicate is very negative, whether or not many of them
are aware of this, since music breaks can have a sort of subliminal
quality, and people who aren't musicians or serious music aficionados
wouldn't generally give them much conscious thought.

But it
does matter, it does have an impact, and if you don't know this from
your own experience, then take it from someone whose musical career
was partially launched by being played regularly on the most popular
radio show on the left in the US – it matters, and it has an
impact, what you do with your music breaks when you have that many
listeners.

What
goes on between the music breaks, that's for another essay. Mostly I
think it's fantastic, and praise-worthy, and I'd miss it terribly if
the podcast weren't around to download to accompany me on the road.
But there's room for improvement, and I'm just trying to put a little
more of the demos in
democracy.